Rural upstate town votes to go 100 percent renewable in four years

ALBANY — A rural town outside of Albany plans to disconnect from the electrical grid, both to increase its reliance on renewable sources of energy and to gain some energy independence.

On Thursday, the town board of Nassau in Rensselaer County voted to get 100 percent of its power from renewables by 2020.

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If all goes as planned, within the next four years, all six of the town buildings will be disconnected from the grid, Nassau supervisor Dave Fleming said. The town is now formulating a plan for how to get all its power from renewables within the next four years.

“It’s not the be-all to end-all for what we should be doing as a state and a nation, but it’s a good first step,” he said, saying the town’s “Yankee independence and ingenuity” were two of its greatest strengths.

Using the rooftops of town buildings and a nearby landfill that has been capped to house solar panels will give the town all the energy it needs, which in turn will provide greater public safety and lower tax bills, Fleming said. The town can also use methane from the landfill and is in a wind corridor that will provide productive turbines, he said.

The tiny town of Nassau — which has just 5,000 people living in a 50-square-mile region — going green is hardly as notable as it would be for one of the state’s major cities to switch to renewables. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has pledged for the city to go 100 percent renewable before 2050, but even with that much longer timeline, implementing that plan will present significant challenges.

But Nassau, because of its size, has arguably the most aggressive renewable plan in New York.

Fleming said he has spent years researching the plan and hasn’t yet found any other examples of municipalities moving so quickly.

“From a practical perspective, it’s possible,” he said. “We have a lot of people resources in our community.”

The state Department of Public Services wants more towns to follow Nassau’s lead, spokesman Jon Sorensen said. Through its Reforming Energy Vision initiative, the Cuomo administration is actively working to help municipalities — especially towns and schools — move toward getting a significant portion of their power from renewable resources. REV is designed to make the energy grid more efficient and increase its reliance on renewables, and it is intended to give consumers more choices than they have now, Sorensen said.

“This is exactly the kind of thing REV is hoping to encourage. Smaller, cleaner power systems are less costly and cleaner alternatives to the bigger power stations that have made up the power grid," he said.

Fleming also said that the utilities that serve the area were slow to replace downed transmission lines and that the town had experienced significant power outrages in recent years, including one that lasted almost a week during an ice storm a few years ago. He said he called about one power pole that was breaking apart, and it took a week to repair it.

Fleming said power outages can become dangerous in rural areas where seniors rely on medical devices for power.

"The reality is the infrastructure in upstate New York is a disaster — the utility infrastructure, the electrical infrastructure,” he said. “We’re hardly a priority on electrical infrastructure. They’ve made that clear.”